[6] Traversing the Pisgah National Forest and the Cherokee National Forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the river's watershed includes some of the highest mountains in the Appalachians, including Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest point in the eastern United States.

At the northeastern end of Embreeville Mountain, the stream emerges from a large gap and turning west-southwest is bridged by SR 81 again.

The dam was sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1939, when the agency was established by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression.

The degree of siltation of the reservoir, called Davy Crockett Lake, had made continued efforts to operate the facility for hydroelectric purposes impracticable.

While the origins of the name-place have long been debated and remain unclear, it is believed to be derived from the name of the Cherokee village Na’na-tlu gun’yi, or "Spruce-Tree Place," that once stood near modern Jonesborough, Tennessee.

During the 1770s, European frontiersmen established the "Nolichucky settlements" along the river in modern Greene County, in what was then part of Cherokee territory.

As hostilities intensified in the mid-1770s between the settlers and a faction of the Cherokee, known as the "Chickamaugas," who were opposed to the settlements, John Sevier, at the time a young militia officer, began overseeing the construction of Fort Lee.

After an invasion was launched by Chickamauga leader Dragging Canoe in July 1776, Sevier abandoned the unfinished fort and fled to the Watauga settlements.

[10] The turn of the century brought trains hauling passengers (until 1955) and mostly coal on the Clinchfield Railroad (now operated by CSX), which still runs alongside the river through the gorge with bridged crossings at Unaka Springs (Erwin) and Poplar, North Carolina.

At least one sunken railcar sits at the bottom of the river near the entrance to the Lost Cove Settlement, a civil-war era ghost town just upriver (and uphill) from the once-disputed Tennessee-North Carolina border.

Between Poplar, North Carolina, and Unaka Springs, Tennessee, the Nolichucky River Gorge provides one of the more scenic and technical whitewater trips in the Southern United States, due in large part to its constant (and often rapid) fluctuations.

Rainfall upstream around Mount Mitchell makes the upper section rapids ever more impressive with significant rain causing extremely big water and un-runnable routes in otherwise ordinary areas.

"[12] Inversely, a lack of adequate rainfall throughout the summer considerably increases the difficulty of navigating the pre-existing aspects of the rapids, which already tend towards being both technically difficult and challenging for rafters.